Salesforce Summer ’20 Release: Top Features

The Summer ’20 Release is coming our way, but it is safe to safe, it has been a crazy couple of months to start 2020…

Salesforce has even had to shuffle the offical release date, allowing for a little bit extra time for business, admins and the to get to terms with the large-scale affect COVID-19 has had.

But as they say, ‘the show must go on’.

And today, the Salesforce’s Summer ’20 Release Notes have now been published, we can now dive under the hood to see what the top features are!

Summer ’20 Release: Timeline

  • May 4th – Release notes are published
  • May 29th – Sandbox refresh deadline/cutoff date, to ensure your sandbox gets early access to Summer ’20 features. You can use the Sandbox Refresh Calculator to help you check your sandbox environments.
  • June 12th & July 10th – Some early access instances of Salesforce will get the Summer ’20 release.
  • July 17th-18th – Most Salesforce environments will get the release over this weekend.

Top Features of Summer ’20 Release

Historically, Summer releases from Salesforce tend to generally focus on the usability side of the equation.

Summer ’20 seems to also fit that mould, with a large focus in Sales/Service Clouds on general productivity improvements to improve how users can interact with Lightning… So here are some of the top features coming our way.

Sales Cloud

  • Opportunity Scoring has some general improvements, increasing consistency and only display access to Scoring Factors a user has access to.
  • Some general tweaks to Opportunity Splits, Territory Management and ability to create Orders without Pricebooks
  • Additional Email Insight now available, showing if a customer has indicated they are ‘Not Interested’
Not Interest insight highlighted in the Activity Timeline.
Email Insight showing customer is ‘Not Interested’
Kanban view of all opportunities with a card selected and the details panel open
Record Details available in Kanban view

Service Cloud

Service Cloud also gets a number of updates to its feature list:

  • Related Record lookup, allowing agents to navigate up to 2 levels of record relationships within Salesforce. (ie directly access the Account of a Contact, which is linked to a case).
  • Knowledge Sharing (available in beta). Allowing you to define sharing rules like standard/custom objects in Salesforce, instead of via Data Categories.
  • And, Einstein Recommended Response is now Generally Available:
Chat Replies component
Einstein Replies in Summer 20, now ‘Generally Available’ and out of Beta.

Salesforce CMS

A number of new features are coming out way, if you are a Salesforce CMS user, including:

General Improvements

Split view after opening a record
Lead with Split View

Flow, Flow, Flow

And finally, deserving of its very own section… Flow!

After receiving a fair amount of attention in Spring 20 Release, Flow continues to push the boundaries between Admin versus Developer!

One-Stop Shop for Automation: Starting a Flow

As part of the change, the trigger points for a Flow have been brought ‘in-house’. No longer requiring a trigger/apex or Process Builder to start the flow.

Along with being able to start Flows directly, and Admin can also choose if they are run before or after a record has been created or edited!

For example, this would allow you to update field values on the record BEFORE it is saved to the database. Need to override a specific field when criteria is met? You can now do this via Flow!

Flow Builder Toolbox and canvas
You can now configure how/when a Flow starts, within Flow Builder.

Admins, can also configure a flow to start directly if a Platform Event is received.

To also recognise these changes, you can also use the Flow Wizard to select the new ‘type’ of Flow:

The Templates tab of the New Flow window
New Flow Templates in Salesforce, as part of Summer ’20 Release

Debugging a Flow, gets a little easier too. With the ‘Rollback Mode’, allowing you to undo any record changes that were made as part of debugging a Flow:

Debug options section of the Debug the flow window
Flows: Now with Rollback Mode

And Flows now also have the ability to run, as a ‘System User’.

One use case for this would be to allow the Flow to ignore Sharing Rules within your org.

Under Show Advanced, System Context Without Sharing—Access All Data is selected for How to Run the Flow.
‘System Context’ now available in Flow! Use with care…

I can’t wait to get my hands on some of these Flow improvements!

What are your favourite features?

With the Summer 20 Release fast approaching, share in the comments below what you are looking forward to the most…

Adam Gill

Hi, Adam here! I am a Trailhead Ranger and also 6x certified. I have been working with Salesforce since 2007, across a wide variety of CRM projects and orgs (both greenfield and legacy). I love travelling and fun fact, I had my scuba diving license before my driving license!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.